[360] he must obey: he fancies himself poor, orphaned, insignificant. The mad crowd drives hither and thither, now furiously commanding this thing to be done, now that. What is he that he should resist their will, and think or act for himself? Every moment, new changes, and new showers of deceptions, to baffle and distract him. And when, by and by, for an instant, the air clears, and the cloud lifts a little, there are the gods still sitting around him on their thrones,--they alone with him alone.There is, it need scarcely be said, a good deal in the works of Emerson-literary criticism, characterization of men and movements, reflection on the state of society — which lies outside of this ethical category; but even in such essays his guiding ideas are felt in the background. Nor are these ideas hard to discover. The whole circle of them, ever revolving upon itself, is likely to be present, explicit or implicit, in any one of his great passages, as it is in the paragraph just cited — the clear call to self-reliance, announcing that “a man should learn to detect and watch that gleam of light which flashes across his mind from within” ; the firm assurance that, through all the balanced play of circumstance, “there is a deeper fact in the soul than compensation, to wit, its own nature” ; the intuition, despite all the mists of illusion, of the Over-Soul which is above us and still ourselves: “We live in succession, in division, in parts, in particles; meanwhile within man is the soul of the whole; the wise silence; the universal beauty . ..; the eternal One.” Emerson's philosophy is thus a kind of reconciled dualism, and a man's attitude towards it in the end will be determined by his sense of its sufficiency or insufficiency to meet the facts of experience. One of Emerson's biographers has attempted to set forth this philosophy as “a synthesis and an anticipation.” It is a synthesis because in it we find, as Emerson had already found in Plato and Plotinus, a reconciliation of “the many and the one,” the everlasting flux and the motionless calm at the heart of things:
An ample and generous recognition of this transiency and slipperiness both in the nature of things and in man's soul seems more and more a necessary ingredient in any estimate of the universe which shall satisfy the intellect of the coming man. But it seems equally true that the coming man who shall resolve our
